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This engaging webinar brought to you by IDFA and Karen Goslin, Registered Clinical Social Worker and Psychotherapist, will provide you with solutions for managing your divorcing clients' negative emotions, including: what your divorcing clients are dealing with as they enter your office and why; how to overcome the common obstacles faced by this population; and invaluable strategies and resources to implement in your practice.

​Home equity is a significant asset for many retirees and one that is increasingly being considered proactively in retirement planning strategies. Join IDFA and Tom Dickson, a former RIA and leading educator to financial advisors, as he covers the four common uses of reverse mortgages by financial planners; provides insights on the most popular reverse mortgage (the HECM) that is backed by the federal government; and delivers advice on how to model reverse mortgages in MoneyGuidePro or any other financial planning program (e.g., eMoney, Naviplan, etc.).​

As financial professionals it is our responsibility to help clients take control of their financial future by giving them a holistic view of their wealth—how much money they have, where it’s going and how to make it. The first step in that process is to help them understand how much income they need to sustain their lifestyle. The second is to help them understand how long they’ll need to sustain that level of income. And the third is to help them get a handle on what rate of return they’ll need to generate in order to do that.

As professionals who practice in the divorce arena, encountering clients who are distraught and emotionally fragile comes with the territory. Although our training and expertise may be in finance, law or another area, we must understand our clients’ mental state in order to effectively and compassionately serve them.​

For many of us, asking for referrals can feel awkward and unnatural. Too many times the focus is on the work recently completed or the products and services just purchased as a means to prompt the question “who else do you know?” Doing a good job or implementing a great strategy and then aligning the referral request to those outcomes is a clunky way to cultivate referrals. An alternative view is to design an experience for the client that is so amazingly beautiful and deliberately [over-the-top] helpful that you don’t even need to ask, because they feel compelled to share you with friends.

As more and more couples are choosing to combine both their property and financial means and resources outside of marriage, it seems only natural that there has been a rise in the demand for Cohabitation Agreements. Cohabitation Agreements, like Marriage Contracts, are often used in parties’ second relationships, following a bitter divorce or custody and access battle between a party and the previous partner. Often times when a party has gone through an unpleasant separation, expending time and money on legal fees, professional consultation, alternative dispute resolution and/or the court process, they typically want to avoid this happening in the future at all costs.

Approximately one in four divorces occurs among couples over 50. Chances are most of your Baby Boomer clients are lumped as “gray divorces.” How and why are they different from other generations? How do they experience divorce differently? Most importantly, how do we serve them most effectively?
Justin Reckers, CFP, CDFA will share common client concerns, creative settlement examples, practice tips, thoughts on behavioral finance, and maybe even answer, “Why now after all these years?”

By now, most divorce financial planners are aware that the recently enacted tax bill will end the favorable tax treatment of alimony payments for divorces finalized after December 31, 2018. However, for the remainder of this year, it is important to remain vigilant about the existing tax rules, especially as clients race to finalize their divorces before the new tax law takes effect.

Retirement assets are often the most substantial part of a marital estate, but there is a surprising lack of knowledge about how to divide such assets among divorcing parties and their lawyers, financial analysts and planners. This is one area of divorce practice where it is especially easy to make mistakes—and those errors often cannot be fixed once they are discovered. In this last installment of the series, we will address common errors related to drafting and implementing QDROs in general.

Even among the younger generations, a lack of financial knowledge and preparedness is keeping women from ending bad marriages and being financially successful post-divorce. Women currently control $14 trillion (51%) of personal wealth in the US and are expected to control $22 trillion by 2020. On the surface, it looks like they are doing pretty well. Despite these increases in wealth, however, the path to financial security for divorced women has many obstacles.